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Mindful U at Naropa University

By Naropa University

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Description

As the birthplace of the mindfulness movement in the United States, Naropa University has a unique perspective when it comes to higher education in the West. Founded in 1974 by renowned Tibetan Buddhist scholar and lineage holder Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Naropa was intended to be a place where students could study Eastern and Western religions, writing, psychology, science, and the arts, while also receiving contemplative and meditation training.
Forty-three years later, Naropa is a leader in ‘contemplative education’, a pedagogical approach that blends rigorous academics, contemplative practice, and experiential learning. Naropa President Chuck Lief explains, “Mindfulness here is not a class. Mindfulness is basically the underpinning of what we do in all of our classes. That said, the flavor or the color of mindfulness from class to class is really completely up to the individual faculty member to work on—on their own. So, what happens in a poetry class is going to look very different from what happens in a research psychology class. But, one way or another the contemplative practices are brought into the mix.”
This podcast is for those with an interest in mindfulness and a curiosity about its place in both higher education and the world at large. Hosted by Naropa alumnus and Multimedia Manager David DeVine, episodes feature Naropa faculty, alumni, and special guests on a wide variety of topics including compassion, permaculture, social justice, herbal healing, and green architecture—to name a few. Listen to explore the transformative possibilities of mindfulness, both in the classroom and beyond!

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CleanBari Tessler: The Art of Money

Bari Tessler is encouraging people to take a more mindful and conscious approach to their relationship with money. When Tessler finished a graduate degree in Somatic Counseling, she sought financial help to help guide her career. She found that most of

There will always be suffering. But with meditation, we begin to transform our relationship to the suffering and therefore the suffering itself transforms too. Dharma is all about relationships - it’s about how we are centered within our sense of self

Naropa University presents encore presentations of our most popular and heartfelt podcasts from 2018, including Phillip Stanley talking on The Relationships Between Sense Perceptions, Concepts, and Emotions :
Dr. Phillip Stanley, PhD, speaks about one

Naropa presents some of the most popular and moving episodes of MindfulU from 2018, including "The Discovery of Meaning and Purpose, with Dr. Itai Ivtzan."
The disciplines of psychology and spirituality both offer us humans a gift. Psychology, being th

While Naropa University spends some contemplative downtime with families and friends for the holidays, we present some of our most popular an moving episodes from 2018, beginning with the Rev. angel Kyodo williams...
Radical dharma and mindfulness - ev

CleanSherry Ellms: Strengthening Our Resilience in a Time of Uncertainty

How are we defining the self? Are we all getting into the real depths of the lie that we are separate, that we're separate entities? Sherry Ellms' students get to explore that separateness and realize that we've always been part of Earth. Consider this

Richard Rudis spent years in Tibet and Nepal, and in the Himalayas, where he met many teachers and many fundamental teachings came forward. At some point, the outline of sacred sound healing became clear, and he introduced the gong once he found a manuf

Diane Israel's platform is about remembering wholeness and healing the complexity of humanity. Very inspired and excited and alive by exercise, she is still very much here to move. Her movie "Beauty Mark" is "...a raw exploration of this quest for perf

Being a better person within the dynamics of relationships really starts with our relationship to ourselves. We constantly cultivate our amazing relationship with who we are in the context of relationships. We can learn to have a better relationship wit

Join us as we sit with Betsy Leach, Elementary Education instructor at Naropa, and discuss the multicultural aspects of public education, and how training in contemplative practices can enhance the experience for everyone. "My experience with students

Listen in to get a history of the first year of Naropa's podcast, Mindful U, via an intimate discussion with our delightful host, David DeVine. From David: "So, before I was 14, I almost became like 8 different religions. But when I turned 21 -- I found

CleanHunter Lovins: Sustainability, Investing in a World You Want to See

If we were to create a regenerative economy here in this region -- what would it look like? People say the Colorado economy is nothing but extractive industries–mining, conventional agriculture, oil and gas–and that's what it always has been, and wh

What is the singular thread that runs through every spiritual tradition? Yoga nidra (nidra means "sleep" in Yoga) gives us a framework off of which to hang so many teachings. Yoga nidra is like a tree with many branches that many spiritual teachings can

If we can protect top-tier predators then we can protect large wilderness areas. The United States wilderness system, the national park system, and the national forest system–which are unparalleled globally–could help us build the room in our hear

"I have been thinking a lot these days in this world we inhabit about how our traditions give us companions and teachers, and that it's one of the most important things. In Buddhism, there are the lineages of teachers that are just absolutely critical

Marlow Brooks teaches a class about the human predicament of being very diverse and celebrating differences. For instance, a fire-type person likes to be out in the sun, likes heat, likes passion. Hot, firey people want to lead. They have great senses o

Look at statistics about our civic literacy in this country–we're in the grip of civic illiteracy largely because not all high schools and colleges are doing enough, though some might be. Not doing enough to make civic literacy actually enough of the

Think about eco-poetics as not just a focus on degraded soil, air and water, but vibrational absence. When a species leaves the planet, they take everything with them. Their heartbeat, their flutter, their footfalls, their hooves. In the past 50 years,

Kaṭha Upaniṣad is a sacred text from the Upaniṣad that describes yoga as a state of mind after the wild horses of the senses have been reined in. There is a metaphor of the body as a chariot, and horse-driven chariots were an important part of Hin

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni on performing her wildly popular one-woman piece, "One Drop of Love," for the Naropa community as part of the Bayard and John Cobb Peace Lecture last Spring: "I have been doing this performance for 5 years, and have been in a lot

Traditionally, Judaism is practiced by way of rituals. This includes actual ritualistic practices that involve ritual objects, but it also includes ritualistic prayer, as well as ritualistic forms of study, such as studying Torah in a certain way. My pe

Clean"Santuario|Sanctuary" - Children, Immigration, and the Migration of the Monarch Butterfly

There should be free movement. There's something about the monarch butterflies having freedom of flight and freedom of mobility that many humans don't have. We found out that in Mexican folklore the monarch butterflies arrive in Mexico at the very begin

Sometimes, especially in mid-career, we get a little stale. It’s nice to refresh by deeply and authentically getting in touch with what matters to us within our core purpose, within our values, and within why we're doing what we are doing. Part of the

Sometimes we take for granted that text is an image–the letters are images–and there are some writers who are very conscious of that. When we're reading a book we take for granted that the text on the page is an image, and the focus of the book is w

The disciplines of psychology and spirituality both offer us humans a gift. Psychology, being the mind-oriented discipline, seems to offer us a chance to envision ourselves within our surroundings. At the same time, spirituality invites us to move beyon

CleanCaitlin Winkley: Life Coaching: Blending the Spiritual with the Practical

Join us as we talk about blending the spiritual with the practical, busting some myths, and providing some tips on what it means to run a business from a spiritual vantage point. When it comes to the term "life coach," or any other spirituality-based pr

Many people are unaware of the interspiritual dimensions of what we offer here at Naropa - the multiple dimensions that we have here. And the fact that a lot of what we've been researching and studying in the last few years is how millennials and Gen Z

It's our mission to grow more awareness of women's issues, women's voices, women's history, women's studies worldwide. We're still so far behind in knowing what we should know about the history of women in the world and their contributions, as well as t

The work of Carl Jung and of Stanislav Grof - as well as many others - have been under an umbrella of "transpersonal psychology," a field that was developed in the '50s as an extension of humanistic psychology. Abraham Maslow first developed humanistic

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There is more to bipolar than just pathology. People are familiar with bipolar as a disorder that used to be called manic-depressive disorder, or maniac depression. Bipolar Order is a declaration of that, and a necessary bridge for people meeting the

"I think of bricolage as an approach to interdisciplinary inquiry and to meaning-making. It comes from a French word meaning to tinker, and it's sometimes associated with improvisation, and sometimes associated with "do-it-yourself." I don't like that t

"Da Vinci said "...motion is life." What better way to move than to some music cranking and to lift the spirit? There is something coded in our
DNA - something really ancient about our need to be tribal, our need as humans to come together with other h

How does teaching with a contemplative focus help teachers in a crazy world? When we have practiced how to love ourselves enough to stand in our own business, then we can be more empathetic to the context from which our students come. If I'm in a class

The Holistic Life Foundation is a Baltimore-based 501(c) (3) nonprofit organization committed to nurturing the wellness of children and adults in underserved communities. Through a comprehensive approach which helps children develop their inner lives th

How do we blend contemplative practice with service in the world? How can we extend ourselves, offer ourselves to that world in an authentic way? One where we're not burning out at the same time? How can we support people both at the peak of tragedy, g

T.I.P.I., the French acronym for “Technique d’Identification des Peurs Inconscientes,” or "Technique for the Sensory Identification of Subconscious Fears" in English, resets our emotional response to trauma naturally, using the body’s sensory me

Improvisation is a wonderful contemplative practice–a mindfulness practice–a discipline that has to do with paying attention in a very precise way to what's going on in the present moment. It's about showing up–being open to whatever is happening

Radical dharma and mindfulness - everybody is going to get a little taste of some meditation, and its great - whatever door you use to enter into practice is great. But - the conflation of mindfulness with a depthful practice that includes an ethic view

I remember it was after the first year I came back to Naropa–I was actually upset with my professors. I was like, "What did you all do? Whatever you offered me, I see the world in a new way now!" I was upset because I saw the world in its fullness. Th

There will always be suffering. But with meditation, we begin to transform our relationship to the suffering and therefore the suffering itself transforms too. Dharma is all about relationships - it’s about how we are centered within our sense of self

When people hear the words "gross national happiness," they tend to envision a sort of idealization of what's really going on in Bhutan, the country that originated the concept. I watch our students while we're in Bhutan sometimes idealize things, and t

In the background of all of all martial arts–outdoor education, Buddhist mind science, indigenous thought–there's a fundamental aspect of how to be in the world, one that is predicated on an elevated awareness. That's really where we start in Naropa

A person has the right answer for themselves, and to express and ask for their needs to be met. It may not look like the answer that, ideally as a therapist, I might think would be best for them. But they have their own answers within, and every time we

We're asking questions about changing an ordinary classroom into something that is as wonderful and nourishing and sustainable as it can possibly be. How does it encourage a great learning environment? How does it become part of the beauty of the campus

CleanDeborah Bowman: Gestalt–Awareness Practice, Healing in the Here and Now

Gestalt therapy is a methodology one can use for therapy or for growth. I like to call it Gestalt Awareness Practice because it’s a way of working in the here and now for healing and growth. Gestalt - from German and not truly translatable into Englis

Ramon Parish is a second-year adjunct instructor in Naropa’s environmental studies department currently teaching a course on Environmental Justice. He also works with Golden Bridge, and with a budding rites of passage networking organization called Yo

There's a real diversity of tactics about how to integrate contemplative practices into the study of writing and the study of literature and the creation of those ways of being. This is about what it means to approach writing through a contemplative way

At Naropa, the notion of contemplative education is one of drawing out the full richness of the student. In this episode of "Mindful U," Professor Richard C. Brown, core faculty in the Contemplative Education grogram, discusses what "contemplative teach

How might the city look differently if you were given more power to shape the contours of the cityscape, or to shape the available institutional fabric? How could our systems be organized differently politically? How could our systems be organized diffe

Ecopsychology is a field whose goal is to bridge our cultures' long standing historical gulf between the psychological and the ecological to see the needs of the planet and the person as a continuum. Transpersonal ecopsychology is the evolving explorati

CleanPhillip Stanley: The Relationships Between Sense Perceptions, Concepts, and Emotions.

Dr. Phillip Stanley, PhD, speaks about one of his favorite class topics: the relationship between sense perceptions, concepts and emotions. Such an exploration leads to surprising insights that leave students often dumbfounded. We think we know what sen

Naropa University professor Brigitte Mars leads students and the overall community in understanding the value of herbs and plants to the body, the mind, and more. Today's episode focuses on Brigitte's work with Naropa students.

‘Oppressions of People and Oppressions of the Earth Go Hand and Hand’. Naropa Professor Jeanine Canty explains the link between social and ecological injustice and how throughout human history, the oppression of people of color has been inseparable

Looking at the ‘new’ science of compassion allows us to focus on what is right about human beings and understand how to cultivate kindness through exercises like compassion training. Acharya Judith Simmer-Brown also gives an example of a compassion

Lief discusses his various roles at Naropa since its founding, and explains what makes Naropa University unique. He then gives an overview of the course he teaches at Naropa as a part of the Peace Studies undergraduate program, Social Innovation and Ent